Upper Room Daily Devotional
Image Courtesy of Upper Room
April 17, 2024
The Upper Room Daily Devotional Guide has been one of my mainstays since I professed my faith in Christ in 1963. I have used it over and over, and I am using it these days. One of the reasons I find it helpful is its commitment to offer “real people, real stories, real faith.” As the years have gone by, the word ‘Real’ has increasingly become my favorite words for God. It allows for any and all of the other names used for God, and it holds the attributes we ascribe to God. But it does so in a way that brings everything together in a life-giving way: real people, real stories, real faith.
For most of my thirty years of teaching, I said that “spirituality is reality.” I did this because there is too much fictional spirituality in the world today—spirituality that bids us live in a fantasy land of religiosity. I have also said “spirituality is reality” because skeptics cry out to folks like us saying, “Live in the real world.” It is very important for us to respond, “We are,” but in saying so, we must be sure it’s true.
Evelyn Underhill began her book, ‘The Spiritual Life’ by writing, “The spiritual life is a dangerously ambiguous term.” That was true in 1936, when she first said so in a radio talk. It has been true all the way back into the Garden of Eden when the snake offered Adam and Eve the waxed fruit of unreal spirituality. And it is true today, in a world where God is described in true and false ways. Spirituality is reality.…Reality….REALITY. But how it is so makes all the difference.
It begins in God, the Real One. God is the substance of all that is, “a Reality always there” (Underhill) revealing God’s-self (Rea!ity) to us and sustaining everyone and everything moment by moment. God is all and in all (1 Corinthians 15:58). Reality continues in us and in all God has made. We call this congruence, “likeness” to the One in whom we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28).
Reality culminates in consecration to God (Romans 12:1). Thomas Merton said “a tree glorifies God by being a tree” (‘New Seeds of Contemplation,’ 29). Everything glorifies God by being true to its nature. We glorify God by being human. And that’s where the fictitious spiritualties go off the rails. They want us to be cartoons, not genuine people. John Wesley called this “angelism,” and he began the Methodist movement to get people out of that fantasy land and into Reality, into life in Christ.
Parker Palmer is a light for so many of us in this regard. He has devoted his life to describing Reality, to help us discern Reality from illusion, and to mature in this Reality until the day we die. He calls it “the reality and power of the human soul” (‘A Hidden Wholeness,’ 143). This Reality comes to us initially through inspiration, but it advances only by intention as one insight leads us farther into God, the infinitely Real One.
This advance is not without struggle, and it comes as we endure the wears and tears of life. It’s the Reality that Margery Williams wrote about in ‘The Velveteen Rabbit,’
“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
The Velveteen Rabbit
UM Insight Screenshot
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
The Real exists. Oh, yes! It is the treasure hidden in the field (Matthew 13:44), and like the person in the parable, once we find it, we will sell all we have to possess it, never again settling for anything less.